Review Summary

In this mordantly funny collage of middle-class Palestinian life, Elia Suleiman, with a mournful, deadpan countenance (and without a word of dialogue), plays a character named E.S. E.S. visits his father in the hospital and meets his lover in a parking lot near an Israeli checkpoint, while his alter ego, the director, excavates the absurdities of occupation and social relations in Nazareth, Jerusalem and Ramallah. The film is a series of elegant visual jokes, interrupted by two elaborate fantasies of vengeance and defiance, and organized around the idea that the modern Middle East is, in unexpected and petty ways as well as the large ones we all know about, a land of bad neighbors.  A. O. Scott